Hogs are close to humans biologically. Can you trust eating the wild ones ? Farmed hogs eat a controlled diet and are safe to eat, but wild hogs could carry trichinosis and many other pathogens common to humans.
Back in 2003, when I first moved to central Georgia onto the old home place, the bastids were coming up in broad daylight to eat me pecans! Well, needless to say I wasn’t having that for very long and I think my grand total was 19 pigs(spread over about 8 months). I was in ‘hog heaven’ so to speak! BBQ’d whole one of the smaller ones, had shoulder roasts, ribs and tenderloin to die for, and once made some of the best smoked link sausage I’ve ever tasted. The population had exploded so bad then that the state DNR relaxed the rules so that hunting over bait was now legal and even allowed the use of 12 volt lights with a no limit, year-round season on them. I eventually set up a ‘killing field’ with a blind in the pasture below the house once the natural ‘bait’ of my pecans were gone and began shooting them at night over soured corn(best hog bait known!) One night I counted 27 pigs that came in before I couldn’t stand it any longer and put 5 rounds into the middle of the biggest group(killed 2 and wounded at least one more that was never found.)
But one evening whilst I was butchering what seemed to be a healthy pig, was #8 or 9-I think, I suddenly noticed something moving inside around the spine. It was a white, flat, worm-like ‘thing’ about 2 inches or so long and it was crawling out from in between two of the vertebra. Nobody has ever been able to tell me what it was-not even my lil’ bro who has a Phd. in poultry science. It was def. some sort of a parasite and the buzzards feasted well on that pig and the rest that I killed were given away with very stern warnings. I never ate another bite of wild pig after that. Shortly afterwards, a nearby commercial tomato farmer got so fed up with his massive losses that he instituted a snare and poisoning program and within about a month they all just ‘disappeared’...